Along the right lines

I had a chance to get into the hide for an afternoon recently to stop crop damage on some winter barley on the farm. The pigeons are getting very keen on the barley kernels now that they are ripening and at their sweetest, green and milky stage of development. We don’t very often get laid patches of barley in this area, as the ground is chalky and the variety of barley the farm sows is very short stemmed and resilient to strong winds and rain.

We don’t very often get laid patches of barley in this area, as the ground is chalky and the variety of barley the farm sows is very short stemmed and resilient to strong winds and rain. It has to be an exceptional storm to flatten any areas, so it does make life difficult for a decoyer. This is because the pigeons drop into the tramlines and feed around the edges of the crop where they can. They don’t get focused into one spot and we have 400 acres that they can spread their feeding over. 

There’s also 1,000 acres of winter rape in a block next to the barley, but I’ll talk about that later. That’s a huge area for pigeons to choose from to feed, so it perhaps appears that there is less damage being caused. The simple fact is that the damage is just less obvious and more difficult to spot. There are a good number of pigeons in the area at the moment — great for decoyers, bad for farmers — but they all eat a handful of barley a day and that takes its toll on the crop.

Fieldcraft

In these situations, you just have to make the best of the cards you’re dealt, use your fieldcraft and try to make something happen. The most likely location that I had been watching and had decided would give me the best chance of bagging some pigeons was at a crossroads of four hedgerows. There are a few ash trees there that are regularly used by the resident flock and they are beside one of my game covers. 

The maize and wild bird mix has just started to come through and soon it will be away. It’s a strip of cover that is 400m long, so there’s plenty of access to the barley edge. The pigeons weren’t interested in the maize at this stage of development and were causing no damage. They were using the open ground as an easy access point to the edge of the barley field. 

The damage along the field edge is pretty obvious if you look carefully. The other advantage of this crossroads of hedgerows is that the pigeons often use features like these in the landscape to navigate along — so hopefully all roads would lead to my hide, or over it at worst. The open ground would give me every chance of picking the shot birds and I don’t like shooting them over standing crops for this very reason — it goes against my principles. 

Inevitably, one or two birds will drop in the crop, but I do all I can to minimise that happening. If or when it does happen, I make sure that I pick the bird as soon as possible and take care to mark the line and distance of where the bird came down. 

A good tip is to look into the distance behind where the bird landed and pick out a feature to give you a line from the hide. Then try to spot which set of tramlines it landed between to give you the distance. It’s not rocket science and it’s incredibly easy to walk out into a crop and lose the spot you were looking at when the bird landed. With good reference points that shouldn’t happen. A quick look back at the hide and then to the point you picked out on the horizon, and you’ll be able to get the line again in no time, and the distance should be straightforward if you marked the tramlines nearest to the dead bird. 

Setting up in this particular location was never going to provide a bonanza day, but it should be possible to get 30 or so birds if the conditions were right, and the day I’d chosen couldn’t have been better. There was a good wind from the west which came from right to left in front of the hide and what sun there was, was to my right as it was the afternoon. The sun shone into the eyes of the pigeons on the flightline I was hoping would be most productive. 

I set up my hide in the hedgerow facing south with the open area of the cover strip in front of me, and the barley field to my left. The ash trees were along the right-hand side of the cover that ran up the hill. I placed a few plastic decoys out — some on the bare land and some sitting up on sticks on the edge of the barley to make them visible above the crop. Then it was a matter of getting comfortable in the hide and seeing if my plan would pay off. 

The flightline I was expecting to be the busiest proved reliable. That’s no surprise as I’ve shot thousands of pigeons on this line before. The birds fly over the motorway that is about 500m away, past the pylons that run across the field and then hug the hedgerow up to the crossroads. It’s been a regular flightline for as long as I can remember. 

Snap decision 

With the stiff breeze on the day, the pigeons were flying low and under the cables, which was better for decoying. If they fly high, they stand a far better chance of spotting you in the hide and have far longer to take a good look at the decoys. When they come low up the field, they have to make a snap decision when they see the pattern and, more often than not, they drop in to join the decoys or pass by in front of the hide within range of my gun. Either way, I get a shot at them. 

All seemed to be working well and the majority of the pigeons that decoyed were coming up the hedgerow from my left at low level. They seemed to spot the pigeons on the sticks and either drop straight in to the decoys on the edge of the barley or land in the decoys on the bare ground in front of me. It was great to see that the plan was working. 

Another flightline was developing further up the slope and I could see plenty of pigeons dropping in to feed at the top of the hill. I’d been expecting this to happen, and as I said earlier, these kinds of situations will never be bonanza days — there are just far too many areas that the pigeons can easily feed. 

After a couple of hours and some great shooting, I started to get yet another flightline appear. It was from behind me and directly above the hide. I started to get pigeons rocketing in at hedge-top height with no warning at all. They flew straight over my head and turned left up to the decoy pattern. They kept me on my toes and made for and enjoyable afternoon’s decoying. As they say, you get every shot in the book on a day’s decoying and I certainly did that day. 

I picked-up at the end of the afternoon with the help of Drake. I’d bagged 28 pigeons, which was a fair effort in the circumstances and it had been an enjoyable few hours. 

So what to expect over the next few weeks for decoying? I mentioned the 1,000 acres of rape briefly earlier, and it feels like summer has only just begun, but some of the rape has already been sprayed off. This is standard practice in farming and it’s done to kill the rape to give it time to dry out before it’s harvested. 

It usually takes two weeks from spraying to being ready for the combine to come in and do its work. It feels strange talking about harvest with the memories of a wet winter and spring so fresh in the memory, but it will soon be upon us. This may or may not provide good decoying opportunities depending on the Great British weather. 

If some of the rape is harvested and then rain stops play, the harvested field or fields will become very interesting to the pigeons as they feed on any rape seeds that get scattered when the combine does its work. If the weather stays fine then farms can continue working non-stop. That again will give the pigeons in the locality massive areas to choose from to feed. The same principle very much applies to both the barley and wheat harvest. Let’s see what the weather gods have in store for us all over the coming weeks — I’m certainly not hoping for any more rain.